The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton (2006)
In 2006, BBC television broadcast a biographical drama, The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton, with Anna Madeley in the title role. This tended to emphasise Mrs Beeton's feminist credentials, as well as playing on the assumption that many viewers would have been unaware of her relative youth when she wrote her books and her early death.
The TV drama, directed by Jon Jones, implied (as put forth in Kathryn Hughes' biography) that Isabella Beeton suffered from syphilis contracted from her husband, and that this may possibly have led to her death and those of her two children, although there is no firm evidence for this speculation. A documentary for the BBC by Sophie Dahl transmitted on BBC2 on 29 September 2011 suggested that it was unlikely that Mrs. Beeton would have died of syphilis at the early age of 28, although it was probable that both her husband and she contracted the disease and that she had passed it on to their first two children who died in infancy.
Read more about this topic: Isabella Beeton
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